feature | Guy Rundle

BLOODY FOOTPRINTS

WAR, LIKE LOVE, means never having to say you’re sorry – at least as far as the commentariat is concerned.
    The invasion of Iraq has just passed its fourth anniversary. By the time this article appears in print, the Iraq conflict will have run longer than the First World War. We are yet to fully comprehend its impact: the destruction of basic order in an entire country; the establishment of sharia law in hitherto the most secular of Arab nations; the unmasking of America’s severely limited ability to consolidate imperial occupations, even in a mid-sized poverty-stricken country; the driving of many erstwhile moderate people in the region towards fundamentalist Islamists; the creation of a global ‘guerrilla focus’ in Baghdad; a basic breach of trust between Western governments and their people over the fraudulent claims concerning WMDs; the preoccupation of such governments with war at the expense of other activities, so that, for instance, according to former home secretary David Blunkett in The Blunkett Diaries, Iraq rendered Tony Blair entirely incapable of any progress on health or education.
    From an anti-imperialist perspective, the diminution of America has resulted in one clear benefit – the reduction of the sole superpower’s ability to wage pre-emptive war (although the invasion has also prompted a transition to a ‘long war’ strategy, in which large-scale area bombing and tactical nuclear weapons might replace occupations). But any conceivable ‘upside’ has been outweighed by the consequences for the Iraqi people. There is no reason to disbelieve the Johns Hopkins University study which puts deaths between 400,000 and 1,000,000 with a likely average of 650,000; one of the most frequent themes voiced on Iraqi blogs and by Iraqis interviewed on news reports is the degree to which human life, particularly in Baghdad, has become as cheap as during full-scale war.
    Once such conditions are established they are very difficult to alter; violence begets violence and revenge, and the ‘propaganda of the deed’ becomes normalised. Infrastructure, already taken backwards by years of sanctions, has not only been damaged but also, as Christian Parenti notes, actually looted by the companies contracted to ‘provide’ services.
    Much of this will be known to readers already, but it is worth repeating if only to establish the extent to which the war has been a wanton crime against humanity, something well beyond a foolish and disastrous military adventure. It’s relevant, too, for a consideration of how prewar political debate within Australia was framed by the media: essentially depicted as divided between an ostensibly seasoned and professional set of pro-war commentators from Right and Left on the one side, and a naïve – if not pro-totalitarian – anti-war movement on the other. With the majority of Australian people from all political persuasions always (aside from a brief period at the very start) opposed to military action, an elite political-journalistic commentariat took it upon themselves to cajole a recalcitrant public into a war. In a culture where journalism is already something of a debased activity, the pundits took the profession to depths never before plumbed.
    The pro-war commentariat was, in other words, responsible, in some measure at least, for the horror in Iraq. The pro-war Right provided the bodyguard of lies for allied governments; the pro-war ‘liberal Left’ did what it could to divide the anti-war opposition. Together, they helped create the situation in which the atomised violence of today’s Iraq could take place. Every pool of blood is tracked through by their footprints.

WMDs, APPEASEMENT AND PACIFICATION
Today, only Christopher Hitchens believes that Iraq was actively trying to get uranium from Niger. In 2002–03 even the revelation that the Blair government had nicked part of its dossier from a student thesis posted on the internet could not dissuade the pro-war barrackers.
    Perhaps the most prominent of local weaponistas was the Australian’s foreign affairs correspondent Greg Sheridan. Sheridan writes both news stories and opinion pieces, although the distinction between them sometimes blurs. His work is a relentless boosting of the US alliance, an activity that dictates all his attitudes, including a deep emotional attachment to dictators (one report for the Australian magazine took the form of an infantilised letter to his editor from Indonesia which began, “Dear boss: the general took me up in his helicopter!”) and an almost erotic interest in the details of weaponry.
    Sheridan set the pace in the days leading up to the war:

After months of seemingly endless diplomatic double-talk, the issue comes down to this: Iraq must be disarmed. (Australian, 19 March 2003)

[Saddam] certainly has biological weapons ... he certainly has chemical weapons. (Weekend Australian, 22 March 2003)

For Sheridan, there was no credible commentator who did not believe:

that Saddam Hussein possesses, and is seeking more, weapons of mass destruction. These were discovered by Richard Butler’s inspectors after information from defectors. No serious figure in the debate anywhere believes Iraq does not have such weapons. (Australian, 27 March 2003)

His confrere at the Australian, Christopher Pearson, was equally certain:

Unless Iraq is disarmed and Hussein toppled, he will be the unchallengeable strongman of the Middle East and all vestige of hope lost for an accommodation between Israel and the Palestinians. Iraq’s costly arsenal, which has immiserated a once-prosperous nation, is plainly intended for use rather than prestige. (Weekend Australian, 22 March 2003)

Tony Parkinson, the hawkish ‘international editor’ of the Age (a post since abolished), went so far as to report that the WMDs had, indeed, been found:

Final judgment must be suspended until more facts become known. But if it just so happens that this discovery is the genuine article, it will expose once and for all the cynical anti-war posturings of France, Germany and Russia at the UN. Moreover, it will make a mockery of all those who proclaimed UN weapons inspections in Iraq to be a viable alternative to armed intervention. (Age, 25 March 2003)

And Frank Devine – who, as a conservative Catholic, is well versed in faith in the absence of proof – proved the most stalwart of all:

But it is inconceivable to me that a bloodthirsty dictator lusting for regional hegemony, who developed WMD to achieve it, gave everything up. The notion that Saddam destroyed his weapons in the 1990s, and kept on bluffing about having them, presents many faces of implausibility ... Did Australia join a worthy cause in Iraq? I’m sure of it. (Australian, 25 July 2003)

The increasingly desperate search for WMDs continued but, as a couple of hundred people pulled down Saddam’s statue for the cameras, the commentators extrapolated Iraq into the future, in paragraphs that time would falsify on an almost line-by-line basis.
    Here are two examples, in contrasting styles.
    Pamela Bone, from the pro-war Left, adopted a magnanimity that displayed her ongoing love of the first-person singular pronoun:

I deliberately didn’t join [the gloating of the pro-war lobby], in print or in private, even though I had supported the war, because while (in my opinion) war is sometimes necessary it is always horrible, and always represents a failure of the human race. Having seen the pictures of suffering and destruction as a result of the war, I didn’t feel like gloating. What I could feel was relief that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was accomplished without the predicted 100,000 dead, without the predicted millions of refugees and without the predicted massive environmental damage. (Age, 12 June 2003)

Piers Akerman, from the hard Right, chose to exult:

The so-called Arab street hasn’t erupted with violence, and there has been little ‘chatter’ suggesting a new wave of international terrorism. Further, it has now been reported that many of the most precious objects in the Baghdad museum were secreted away by curators, well in advance of the looting that broke out, and have been kept safe for posterity.The usual raft of non-government organisations are clamouring for access to their new clients. But there, too, the picture is far more optimistic than expected. The promised rivers of refugees, numbering in the millions, failed to materialise. The hundreds of thousands of internally displaced homeless aren’t there either. Legions of superannuated generals have been proved wrong, along with claques of clergymen and reams of self-opinionated commentators. Even though they were all so quick to offer their abuse of the United States and urge a collapse into the appeasement camp, they have been silent. (Sunday Telegraph, 20 April 2003)

Such heady days, before the “predicted 100,000 dead” became the actual 650,000 dead, and the “promised rivers of refugees” and the “hundreds of thousands of internally displaced homeless” became the real millions of both.
    Akerman’s reference to the “appeasement camp” provides a reminder of another pro-war meme of the time.
    For many in the commentariat, the destruction of Iraq was as necessary to ‘pacify’ the region as the destruction of militarism had been to liberate Europe during the Second World War. The parallels between anti-war agitators and the peace movement of the late 1930s were, therefore, exact.
    For Gerard Henderson, for instance, a broken country with a no-fly zone imposed on it posed a military threat equal to the industrialised might of the Nazis:

The evidence indicates that, on occasions, only force or the threat of force can achieve peace. If Walker’s war-is-not-the-answer pacifist views had prevailed in 1939 and after, the Nazis and the fascists would have conquered the world. Let’s give common sense a chance. (Sydney Morning Herald, 18 February 2003)

Andrew Bolt, choosing a slightly different analogy, saw the decision to invade a country halfway across the world as equivalent to resisting invasion from the Japanese empire:

[John Curtin] realised that appeasing tyrants didn’t work. That there was nowhere to hide in a global war. That helping allies meant they, in turn, were obliged to help us in a fight for our survival. That sometimes our duty is clear – to fight tyranny and defend freedom. Simon Crean can still make that choice. The histories of the coming weeks are yet to be written. Let us hope they come to praise Crean’s courage, as they now do Curtin’s. (Herald Sun, 20 February 2003)

Of course, ‘pacification’ turned out as well as the other elements of the pro-war case, as Iran’s Ahmadinejad won an election over a more liberal candidate precisely because voters identified him as a leader who would stand up to the US, while Israel’s knock-on invasion of Lebanon persuaded most Lebanese that Hezbollah fought in their interests.

REVERSAL
By late 2003 and into 2004, it was clear that, after George Bush’s ‘mission accomplished’ speech, the ‘peace’ phase of the war was not proceeding well. Many commentators began to back away slowly, suddenly finding a passionate interest in other – any – topics. Several rhetorical strategies emerged.
    The first involved a slow move out of unabashed triumphalism and into more neutral reportage – as if one had never been a war advocate in the first place. This change developed pretty quickly around the middle of 2006.
    Thus in March of that year, Greg Sheridan could still begin an article with:

The Iraq war was the right war against the right enemy at the right time, and waged for broadly the right reasons. There is no need to apologise about it. Notwithstanding many mistakes in execution in the peace-keeping phase, provided the coalition of the willing retains its nerve there is every chance of achieving a reasonable outcome still. Success is not guaranteed.

He concluded cautiously, and then built on a series of ‘what-ifs’ to the conclusion:

Given [Saddam’s] intimate involvement with Palestinian terrorism, and his grandiose historical vision, it is plausible that he may have provided WMDs to terrorists. (Australian, 23 March 2006)

By May, however, Sheridan had sniffed the wind:

The conflict in Iraq is getting both better and worse. The fact that the military struggle now centres on the Iraqi political process shows the importance of the political track and while that moves along, even at snail’s pace, it is a hopeful sign. But the sickening violence of recent weeks, in Baghdad especially, shows the nature of the conflict in Iraq is changing. It is less now an insurgency than a spreading sectarian conflict. (Australian, 24 May 2006)

Not all pundits followed that retreat. Some – mostly the journalistic shock-jocks – proved less circumspect about the maintenance of any significant relationship with reality. Thus Frank Devine wrote in mid-2004:

Signs of progress in Iraq are encouraging . . . The redeployment in Fallujah and the patient siege of the holy city of Najaf is evidence that the agile Americans will do whatever it takes to achieve an epochal Iraqi election in January 2005. (Australian, 7 May 2004)

For Devine, the apparent disasters facing the ‘agile Americans’ were entirely illusory:

The administration has steadied in its perspective on the war against terror and its strategic initiatives in the Arab peninsula. [The White House is] avoiding too much singing and dancing in the Oval Office ... Comment in Australia has been almost universally glum, with no gleam of hope found in any facet examined. (Australian, 4 November 2005)

Fancy.
    Like Devine, Andrew Bolt blamed the media – a curious approach, one might think, for a journalist:

We get to read and hear so much horror from Iraq, but when the news is positive, most media falls strangely silent. In a selfish way, I’m glad just one newspaper reported just one line of Major-General Jim Molan’s speech two weeks ago. What better proof of what I’ve argued so often – that you are not being told the good news from Iraq. (Herald Sun, 15 July 2005)

For Bolt, simply questioning the morality of the war helped the terrorists to win:

Saddam’s regime killed briskly. Far more were killed each day under his rule. We need feel no shame for having deposed this dictator. We see the bodies bleed in Iraq and ask: ‘Was the war really worth this?’ Three years after the start of the war in Iraq – 19 March 2003 – we hear protesters say, No. Look at the dead. We’ve made things worse. And so the terrorists have won one victory at least. (Herald Sun, 22 March 2006)

By 2007, Bolt had become as self-contradictory and delusional on war as on climate change. Of the British government’s political retreat from Basra, he explained:

No, it is not a pull-out, and Iraq is not lost. Odd. When President George Bush sends 21,000 more American troops to Iraq, critics say it proves the place is a mess. Now, when Tony Blair says he’ll bring back 1600 of Britain’s 7100 soldiers, the same critics crow that this proves it’s a mess, too. But from the British Prime Minister’s announcement it’s clear both moves are part of the same plan, and Iraq is not lost at all. (Herald Sun, 23 February 2007)

Likewise, Pamela Bone, now writing for the Australian, tracked explicitly into fantasy:

How do you argue with those who see no moral distinction between bin Laden and Bush? In his book The End of Faith, Stanford University’s Sam Harris asks us to consider the test of the ‘perfect weapon’. A perfect weapon would be one that that could kill only its target without causing any collateral damage. If such a weapon existed, who would be more likely to use it? If for no other reason than that he is accountable to his own people and ultimately to world opinion, Bush would probably choose to use the perfect weapon. (Australian, 11 September 2006)

Which is a convenient way of dealing with the fact that Bush has killed many more innocent people than bin Laden.

ENDSTAGE: BLAME THE LEFT
Around the time of the second Johns Hopkins study, most of the Right started to desert the Iraq cause, especially in the US. Right-wingers could, after all, damn the execution of the war, and even confess to hubris; they could resort to the conservative tradition of realpolitik, sadder but wiser.
    For Bone and the pro-war Left, such options weren’t available. They had established new identities through the ‘military humanitarian’ crusade; any acknowledgement of how much they’d damaged those they purported to help would have thrown their political personalities into turmoil.
    In assessing the moral emptiness of such people, it should be remembered that the decision to bomb or not to bomb someone in the name of their own best interests is not a symmetrical choice. The weight of evidence must be overwhelming before such a course could even be contemplated. If a military intervention is undertaken purely because one estimates that the violence done will be numerically less than the violence which might otherwise have occurred, the effect is to deny the agency of those one purports to help and the worth of their individual humanity, as British philosopher Bernard Williams has argued.
    Advocating ‘humanitarian’ war but ducking responsibility for unintended consequences is a deeply corrupting process. Not surprisingly, the pro-war Left responded to the failure of their project by blaming the anti-war movement for being right about the outcome but for the wrong reasons. Since most of the local pro-war Left were fairly dim bulbs, the publication of Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? was a godsend, as Cohen – unlike the locals – had a knowledge of the key events of the twentieth century, even if his interpretation of such was manifestly inadequate to anyone but a features writer.
    Cohen’s logic defined the Left by the struggle against fascism, declared all dictatorial regimes fascist and therefore concluded that the Left had betrayed itself.
    The syllogism appealed to Bone, whose desperation was now visible:

Yes, those who opposed the Iraq war are entitled to feel vindicated. But wouldn’t you think leftist commentators could put aside their self-righteousness long enough to support the Iraqis who are trying to build a free and democratic society? (Australian, 1 February 2007)

Bone is, one assumes, doing volunteer work in a Baghdad hospital to atone for her errors.
    Julie Szego, the pale copy of Bone now occupying the same slot at the Age, recounted Cohen’s thesis and concluded:

Defending fascist regimes is a sign of moral cancer. (Age, 20 February 2007)

Nelson Mandela and Xanana Gusmao, among others, spoke out against war. Such people presumably knew something about state terror and ‘fascism’. But Szego’s reasoning is so circular as to be proof against absurdity.
    It takes deep ignorance to hold these positions – just as the stances of the pro-war Right require a profound callousness. Frank Devine, Greg Sheridan and Gerard Henderson never gave a damn about the Iraqi people or overthrowing fascism – they are willing to actively or passively support most of the grisly Right-wing dictatorships on offer, in Latin America or elsewhere. Christopher Pearson coyly referred to his Leftist background in a couple of articles, without revealing that he was once a fervent Maoist, attracted to a movement that had become a cult of violence for the same reason he was later drawn to mother church, out of desperate psychological need rather than any political logic. Albert Langer, Kerry Langer and Barry York, other Maoists or ex-Maoists who gained access to the op-ed pages to argue a pro-war line (and signed their articles with embarrassing cries of “long live the bourgeois democratic revolution!”), were operating out of the same unreality that once convinced them that Mao’s analysis of peasant societies applied to Australia in the 1970s.
    Whatever their divisions, all of this shabby crew remain united in their inability to face the basic truth that the Iraq invasion involved the visiting of high-tech death on a largely defenceless society.
    What will be the ultimate effect of this fiasco for the pro-war commentariat? They will probably be a bit more circumspect, aware that the Australian public is decidedly against the war. If you’re a pundit, it’s damaging to open up too great a division between yourself and your readership. They will have much less traction in urging people on to the next war in Iran.
    But as the polling for Kevin Rudd shows, the commentariat always has less impact than it likes to believe.
    As soon as Labor offered a leader who wasn’t tired or mad, people switched back to the ALP en masse, and all the preening of the Andrew Bolts didn’t make much difference. Energy devoted to fighting the next war is more productively spent at the grassroots, through peace networks and the like, rather than worrying too much about the airy reaches of the op-ed pages. Nevertheless, a full examination of their shameful record, of which this article is only one facet, has to be a part of fighting against the next war.

Guy Rundle is the European editor of Arena magazine.

© Guy Rundle

Overland 187–winter 2007, p.21